Dick Cheney, US vice-president, on Tuesday defended the US decision to invade
Iraq but, in a notable shift of emphasis, he left open the question of whether
Saddam Hussein had possessed weapons of mass destruction - a claim he made repeatedly
before the war. In his first public response to David Kay, who resigned last
Friday as the chief US arms inspector saying pre-war intelligence was wrong,
Mr Cheney said: "There's still work to be done to ascertain exactly what's
there, and I am not prepared to make a final judgment until they have completed
their work."

The vice-president had been one of the administration's most vocal champions
of the view that Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons. Shortly before
the war he also claimed it had "reconstituted" nuclear arms.

As voting began in the New Hampshire primary to choose the Democratic candidate
for November's presidential election, Mr Cheney also rejected an assertion by
John Kerry, front-runner in the polls, that the administration had broken promises
over the war. "We used force only because all other options had failed,"
he said in an interview in Rome with European newspapers, including the Financial
Times.

During the interview, Mr Cheney highlighted comments by Mr Kay which supported
the case that the former Iraqi leader had sought to develop prohibited weapons
long after big stockpiles were destroyed in the early 1990s.

He quoted Mr Kay as saying Iraq had continued "until the end" to develop
biological weapons, such as ricin, had maintained a missile programme and had
restarted its nuclear programme in 2000-1.

Meanwhile, in Washington President George W. Bush repeated his assertion that
Mr Hussein had been "a grave and gathering threat to America and the world".
Speaking to reporters during a meeting with Aleksander Kwasniewski, the Polish
president, Mr Bush complimented Mr Kay but implicitly went against his findings
by defending the US intelligence services.

"Well, first of all, I have got great confidence in our intelligence community,"
Mr Bush said while not directly addressing the question of whether Iraq actually
had prohibited weapons.

On Tuesday, Mr Kay went further in seeking to justify the US case for war despite
his belief that Mr Hussein's programmes had failed, in part because his scientists
had cheated him. "I think, at the end of the inspection process, we'll
paint a picture of Iraq that was far more dangerous than even we thought it
was before the war," he told NBC.

Mr Cheney repeated the conciliatory message he has delivered during his trip
to Europe, seeking international co-operation in Iraqi reconstruction and war
on terror. But he never wavered from his insistence that the US had been right
to fight the war.